


high desert winter

by MasterOfAllImagination



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Western, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-08
Updated: 2017-01-08
Packaged: 2018-09-15 17:12:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,318
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9247445
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MasterOfAllImagination/pseuds/MasterOfAllImagination
Summary: The winter of ’76 grinds the track-laying to a halt.  Snow obscures the ground and numbs the men’s hands, which sometimes stick to the rails and come away bloody if pulled too quickly. There isn’t enough firewood to go around at night.“We wait it out,” Krennic says. “Desert snow never lasts long.”Oh, but Galen fears that he’s wrong this time.(Western!AU)





	

The winter of ’76 grinds the track-laying to a halt. They’re thirty miles east out of Salt Lake City and the Wasatch Mountains are visible on the horizon, low and craggy.  Snow obscures the ground and numbs the men’s hands, which sometimes stick to the rails and come away bloody if pulled too quickly. There isn’t enough firewood to go around at night.

“We wait it out,” Krennic says. “Desert snow never lasts long.”

Oh, but Galen fears that he’s wrong this time. There is something about the bite of the air that reminds him of winters in the upstate New York hamlet from whence he hails, something that he does not believe Krennic has ever known, being born and bred in coastal California as he was. 

“Are you sure?” Galen asks, one hand on the rough lintel of the Imperial Railway Co. outpost building, eyes roaming the snow-strewn land and the mountains beyond. “Perhaps we can relocate camp. Just temporarily.”

He shakes his head. “Not necessary.  We wait.” And then, a bit petulantly: “Get out of that doorway, won’t you? You make me cold just looking at you.”

Galen’s mouth is set against more than just the chill, but he ducks inside anyway, letting the leather curtain flap back into place across the door. Slightly numb hands push shaggy hair back from his forehead. His eyes have to adjust to the dim interior of the ramshackle building after the bright of the white snow.

Krennic has his boots up on the table. “How long do you think the delay will set us back?”

“Two months.” A shrug. “Maybe more.”

His boots slip off the table and thud to the floor. “ _Two months?_ No way in _hell_. This snow will be gone in two _days_.”

“If you’re so certain, then why solicit my opinion?” Galen asks mildly.

“Because I respect it. Even when it’s wrong.” Krennic lifts his mouth into a half-smile to take the offense away, but the gesture isn’t needed. Galen knows when his friend is hiding truth in a joke.

As lightly as he can, Galen says, “if you’re sure,” and draws out his cigarette case.  He lights one with a practiced drag of a match across the edge of the table and inhales long from it before passing it to Krennic’s waiting hand. They trade it back and forth idly until it’s too short to smoke, and Krennic stubs it out carefully on the heel of his boot.

 

Two days pass, and on the evening of the second day, fat white flakes begin to float down from the sky, dusting Krennic’s hair and shoulders as they stand together on a ridge overlooking the abandoned end of the tracks. Krennic is wearing his gun belt underneath his omnipresent bleached white poncho, with its hem worn ragged and permanently grey from the dirt of daily work and wear. For once, it blends him into the desert landscape instead of picking him out from it.

A seed of unease sprouts in Galen’s sternum. His eyes flit like a lizard’s to Krennic, to the sky; to the slight lumps of the rails where the snow has covered them over and softened their edges.  It’s no more than an inch or two of accumulation, and in places, red sand still shows through, although robbed of its vibrancy by the heavy clouds overhead. But the snow is enough.

Beside him, Krennic has gone very still, made all the more noticeable in the preternatural silence of evening snowfall. Galen’s hand goes to his own belt. “Orson,” he warns, but he’s too late.

Krennic turns from the ridge without a word and draws his .45 as smoothly as Galen could light a match, emptying all six chambers into the ground a few meters in front of them, shattering the silence in the way only percussion-loud gunshots can. When the barrel is smoking and the rounds are spent, Krennic kicks the snow viciously, sending up a shower of white and red.

Galen waits. It’s all he can do when Krennic gets in one of his rages. The railway workers scatter like cockroaches in the face of his wrath, and cower when it is absent lest they wake it, but Galen has weathered it too often to be intimidated any longer. Much the way he has weathered many a winter, and is now too wise to take it anything less than seriously. A lesson Krennic is having a hard time learning.

So he waits.

Eventually, Krennic pulls six bullets from his belt and reloads his .45 as though each and every bullet is a damned soul he wishes to send personally into hell. When he looks up, his gaze settles somewhere on the horizon. “We break camp in the morning,” he declares. 

Galen nods.

They walk side by side down the ridge, leaving parallel paths of footprints.

 

When night has fallen and the fire has been banked, Galen waits for Krennic to settle into snoring, and takes out a small cameo.  He cradles it with obsessive care, not in concern for its cost—which had been high—but out of love for that which it represents.  It is, after all, the only thing he has left to remember her by.

In the wan light of the coals, he lets his gaze run over each carved rivulet of hair, replacing them in his mind’s eye with the real thing, nearly able to see her turn and smile as his eyes half-close and his mind drifts towards something like sleep.  He eventually remembers himself enough to shake awake so that he can hide it on his person again before sleeping.

“Put her away, Galen,” comes Krennic’s voice, soft out of the night.  Galen startles slightly, and curses himself for it. Though his fingers are shaking from cold and nerves, he manages to get the cameo safely back into the pocket of his waistcoat, alongside his watch. His cheeks flush and feel twice the hotter for the comparative cold of the night air.

Krennic speaks again.  He sounds very awake. “How many years has it been?”

Galen shrugs. Snow has gathered across his shoulders, but the movement barely stirs it, already melting into wetness from his body heat. “I don’t know exactly.”

“Twelve years,” Krennic says. 

Galen’s eyes close involuntarily. “I’m sorry.” They’re on opposite sides of the fire, but Galen pulls himself up, shivering.  He drops himself to a seat next to Krennic’s prone form, the white poncho blending into the shallow-fallen snow all around them, making him look like a piece of the ground.  A hand falls to rest in his slightly damp hair.  _I’m sorry_ , his fingers say as they slide along his ear and neck and scalp.

In response, Krennic hitches his poncho tighter and curls closer to the embers. 

 

They supervise the workers from horseback as they strike camp, breath puffing visibly from their mouths.  Krennic has conceded to a close-fitting company cap, and Galen has his well-worn Stetson pulled firmly over his hair.

“We’ll head for Salt Lake.” Krennic glances to Galen. The man seems to be asking for approval.

“The Wasatch Range lies between us and it,” Galen reminds him.

Krennic throws up his gloved hands, brandishing the reins slightly and causing his mount to sidestep. “Where else would you suggest?”

“I wouldn’t.  Just wanted to make sure you remembered.”

“We looked at the map together this morning, Galen.”

“All the same.  Sometimes--” he’s about to say, _you misremember things_ , but last night comes back to him all at once, and he knows that it isn’t true.  Krennic remembers everything. Especially the things Galen would prefer him to forget.

The man waits.  Eventually, Galen licks his lips, regrets it when his spittle freezes, and relents. “Salt Lake City, then.”

 

The party is only as fast as its slowest member, and currently that role is filled by the mules and oxen, weakly dragging the unused rails and lumber through the ever-accumulating snow.  Before long, they lose the track altogether, and navigate purely by compass, vaguely south-westward.  They go slow. _Gratingly_ slow. When their horses shift close, Galen can hear Krennic’s teeth grinding together. His own start to chatter an hour so into the forced drive, their pace not vigorous enough for heat to generate from exertion. 

“This is _ridiculous_ ,” Krennic spits at him from time to time.  Or variations thereof. Each time, Galen shrugs, and offers a nonsequitur in return, more to reassure himself that his voice still works than to reassure Krennic. 

It isn’t the coldest he’s ever been by a long shot. The winter of ’43 would probably take that title, when Galen had been halfway between man and boy, catapulted that much closer to manhood by the accidental death of his father in a hunting accident that same fall. Mama had taken ill in early October, leaving all the housework to him alone: splitting wood, hauling water, tending the chickens, doing the washing and cooking. Survival for them both had been a God-granted miracle.

But the snow gets heavier as they drag themselves closer to the steely Wasatch range, and the wind picks up steadily as they begin the climb into the passes. They aren’t usually blocked yet this time of year.

Galen is afraid of the snow for the first time as he wonders if they're still clear.

They slow even more.  Visibility is on-par with a dust storm, and they’re forced to dismount and lead their party on foot, Krennic immediately wrapping his arm tight around Galen’s waist, Galen clutching him hard around the shoulders in defense against the wind. Their heads crane towards each other, both to keep their eyes from stinging too badly and to chase whatever fleeting body warmth they can.

Night slips up like a thief and surprises them all. They can see five feet in front of them, then suddenly one, then none at all, and when they all look up they realize the clouds have blocked out the moon and stars.  Krennic calls a halt, his rough yells somehow piercing the pressing gloom.  Fitful fires spring up and grateful men crowd round. 

They won’t have enough wood for another night like this.

Krennic breaks out their hard tack.  Neither of them have the patience or the feeling in their hands to wait for a warm meal. Hunched together near the fire, they eat like desert dogs, selfishly and quickly.

_We should have left sooner,_ Galen wants to tell Krennic.  But _I should have pushed you to leave sooner_ is just as true, isn’t it? They’re both culpable.  And all they can do is curl around one another, under the same blankets, shirt to shirt but still not warm enough, and hope none of the animals die in the night, and put the work even further behind schedule. Governor Tarkin won’t be pleased as it is, and Galen spares some sympathy for Krennic, liable to take the brunt of the man’s abuse as soon as they hit town.  He curls closer to Krennic.

A whisper: “Are you awake?”

An answering _hmmm_.

“Wish I’d never let you talk me into coming back,” Galen says into the scant space between them.  But his mouth is so close to Krennic’s skin that it’s more like a verbalized kiss than an actual regret.  “You promised me it would be warm in Utah.”

“We go where the track goes.” 

_And the track goes where Tarkin says_.  No matter how much he knows Krennic wishes it were different.

 

Morning dazzles them like sunlight glancing off a lake.  For a moment, Galen looks around and doesn’t know where he is, his eyes throbbing in pain. Then his pupils have a chance to shrink.  Bright sun reflects off a foot of new-fallen snow, cocooning their bodies, crusting their eyelashes and hair and eyebrows.  Galen shakes Krennic’s shoulder to shift his deadweight off of him, and for a blinding, stabbing moment of terror, the man doesn’t move. 

….and then he groans, and Galen has never been happier for the arrival of Krennic’s notoriously sour morning mood. So happy, in fact, that he seizes this moment, while the rest of the camp still sleeps and the snow shelters them, to kiss his chapped lips.  It’s scratchy and slightly painful.  He tastes blood.  But then Krennic parts his lips slightly, giving Galen the heat of his mouth, and it’s the warmest thing he’s felt in days.

They rise to discover a mule and a man have died in the night.  Stamping his feet and chafing his hands, Krennic declares this loss acceptable, and waves the other track layers to leave the body.  They look back at him with mutinous glares that Krennic returns with one of his own, and they subside, although they draw a blanket over the body and cross his arms with some difficulty. 

Midday brings them to the end of a pass and grants them their first view of the Salt Lake Valley, the great lake itself shimmering in the distance, the huddle of buildings directly below them like grains of tobacco lying on a rolling sheet. Speaking of—

At first, his fingers are too stiff to wrestle his cigarette case from his coat.  He warms them under his arm for a moment as the company catches up and falls in behind them, waiting to make the descent as a group.  Striking the match is even harder, but it lights, and the first hard drag of smoke mixed with brutal mountain air brings on a coughing fit so violent Galen nearly drops the precious tobacco.

Krennic nudges his horse closer. The spasm passes, and Galen smokes again before handing it off to the man beside him. 

They finish it in silence, occasionally passing a smile between themselves along with the cigarette.

Krennic takes a last drag and flicks it away. “Shall we?”

“We shall.”

They descend into the valley.

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by the movie Magnificent Seven (an extremely Quality film despite what you might assume) and a recent desert snowfall near my own home. Just taking a small break between chapters of my longer Galennic fic, _Sum Total._ Disclaimer: un-researched and un-betaed. 
> 
> (Tumblr: terribleoldwhitemen. Sometimes I post drabbles and edits. Most times I tag-scream about Ben Mendelsohn's face.)


End file.
